Because this sort of thing always ends well in horror movies ... Maika Monroe and Jake Weary in It Follows
Photograph: PA

Youth culture moves fast, and Hollywood barely makes an effort to keep up. Year after year, a host of screenwriters line up to offer their best approximations of the adolescent experience, most of them drawn from reminiscences some 20 years past their sell-by date.

At first glance, a few might pass for contemporary, but the devil is in the details: any time you see a teenage character onscreen, drooling over a porn magazine, asking a member of the opposite sex for their phone number, or hanging out at the arcade, you can be sure they were the product of a mind too frazzled to fully appreciate the significance of PornHub, WhatsApp and Candy Crush Saga to today’s 16-year-olds.

The new teen horror movie It Follows deftly sidesteps these pitfalls by recognising the impossibility of distilling teen culture into an easily digestible 90 minutes. Instead, it approaches the unwieldy subject of adolescence sideways on.

Indelible newcomer Maika Monroe plays 19-year-old Jay, a softly sardonic US high-schooler whose life is thrown into chaos when an impulsive fling with enigmatic heart-throb Hugh (Jake Weary) goes badly awry. After diligently guiding her through the set menu of teen romance – dinner, the movies, a fumbled fuck in the back of his sedan – Hugh reveals an ulterior motive. Moments earlier, he was the bearer of a deadly curse, and now he’s passed it on to her.

In a scene that’s both plainly expositional and dazzlingly tense, Hugh takes Jay to the top of a multistorey car park and gestures out at a shadowy figure moving in their direction. This is the “it” of the film’s title, a shape-shifting ghoul that stalks its prey with methodical patience. Jay will be forever at the mercy of this slow but unyielding predator unless she too elects to pass the curse along, by means of sexual intercourse.

It girl: Maika Monroe stars in teen horror It Follows. Photograph: Other

The film’s creator David Robert Mitchell is carrying an infection of his own when we meet on a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles. He picked up a cold at the Sundance film festival, where It Follows recently had its US premiere, and it’s been following him around ever since. Unlike any of his characters, however, he nobly refuses to pass the burden on to me, instead dutifully raising a scarf to his mouth with every sneeze, splutter and cough.

I’m keen to grill Mitchell, who’s 40 but wouldn’t look out of place in a high-school yearbook, on the challenges of capturing adolescence on screen, and chances are he’s guessed as much. In an attempt to steer our conversation towards the topic, I’ve asked him to meet me in a suburban shopping mall, and he doesn’t seem overly impressed.

“I get it,” he assures me as I rush to explain the reasoning. “I totally get it.”

Mitchell’s 2010 debut The Myth Of The American Sleepover followed four teens as they traversed a world of mumbled passions, wasted opportunities and lukewarm beer across a single Friday night in the suburbs. It Follows, which features some of the most visceral screen violence I’ve seen in recent years, might seem like an unlikely follow-up, but beneath their surface differences, the films share a central impulse: to explore what it is to be young.

I made the film intentionally to be open to lots of different interpretations

David Robert Mitchell

If The Myth Of The American Sleepover got halfway there by favouring quiet realism and an aversion to dramatics, It Follows gets a whole lot closer with a throbbing electro score, a special effects budget, and a vertiginously high concept at its centre. Could the key to adolescent reality be a sense of the unreal? Exhibit A: in It Follows, adult characters are used as empty vessels for the creature at large, so whenever grown-ups do appear onscreen, they’re eerie, unfathomable and lurking just at the edge of our peripheral vision; somehow both present and absent at the same time. It works as a smart metaphor for the relationship between teenagers and their parents.

Like The Fly, Alien and Fatal Attraction before it, It Follows has been hastily identified in some quarters as an Aids parable. It’s not hard to see why: with most of its horror arising from the unforeseen consequences of casual sex, the film undoubtedly invokes the dread associated with sexually transmitted disease. I ask Mitchell what he makes of this as we ascend an escalator in the direction of JC Penney. “The truth is, a lot of people read it that way, and I don’t want to tell them they shouldn’t,” he says. “I made the film intentionally to be open to lots of different interpretations.”

This seems as good a moment as any to tell Mitchell that I have an interpretation of my own, and ask if he’d like to hear it. Short of a frantic dash back down the escalator, he hasn’t got much of a say in the matter.

The It man and her: director David Robert Mitchell and star Maika Monroe. Photograph: Jeff Vespa/WireImage

If you ask me, the looming threat of It Follows is not venereal but social. It’s not the creature that Jay is really running from, but the pressure of her classmates’ attention in the wake of a very public indiscretion (word of her relationship with Hugh spreads quickly after the police get involved). In the 2010 teen comedy Easy A, Emma Stone propelled herself to high-school infamy after claiming to have lost her virginity at a house party. Soon, she discovered that her new-found notoriety was contagious, able to be transferred to a new host at will. Likewise, in It Follows, the focus is not simply on who’s done it, but on who did it last.

“I like your interpretation. It’s cool.”

I pause for further validation but find it unforthcoming.

“Unfortunately, I’m not going to pick sides and say you’re right and they’re wrong,” he says. “The honest answer – and it’s probably the irritating one – is that I had several things in mind when I wrote the film.”

Mitchell grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, and returned there to shoot both of his films, though unlike many film-makers who shoot in the area, he resisted the urge to exploit the city’s crumbling centre for what the Tumblr community calls “ruin porn”.

Instead, It Follows uses the divide between Detroit’s rich and poor, famously epitomised by the vast 8 Mile Road that bisects the city, as a metaphor for another great divide: that between childhood and adulthood. As children, Jay and friends were forbidden from venturing beyond the safe limits of suburbia. Today, freedom looms and it’s bittersweet. “Now that we’re old enough,” she wonders aloud at one point, “where do we go?”

Is It Follows a document of Mitchell’s own adolescence? Throughout the film we glimpse e-readers and other artefacts of 21st-century life, but some aspects feel less contemporary. At one point, Jay uses a landline phone, a device surely as anathematic to today’s teenagers as the penny-farthing or the Ford Model T. As we round a corner past a branch of Gap Kids, Mitchell explains this discrepancy: “Some people think it’s supposed to be the 1980s, and there are hints of that, but there are also modern things. It’s a mixture of universes, a world we don’t live in.”

That perhaps sounds like a cop-out written down, but I can tell that Mitchell has thought this through, and it’s hard to argue with his logic. If It Follows exists in an alternate universe where humanoid sex spectres are possible, why shouldn’t it also occupy an alternate time and place? Walking through the artificially lit shopping mall – its identikit stores stretching out before us like some kind of bleak, capitalist mirage – the notion of a hermetically sealed teen world doesn’t seem so remote.

“The movie is not a statement of what a teenager at this exact moment is like, because I have no idea,” admits Mitchell, “it’s more like an impression.”

Like all good impressions, It Follows stays true to the spirit but not the letter of its subject matter. Its teen characters are in many ways unfamiliar, but their preoccupations – chiefly sex and death – are evergreen. These twin obsessions are found at every level of the film, dancing between text and subtext. While Jay stares death in the face at the hands of her paranormal tormentor, another student comes to terms with her mortality via a Dostoyevsky set text. After two characters willingly transfer the curse between them, they share an exchange that could follow almost any adolescent dalliance, supernaturally charged or otherwise:

“Do you feel any different?”

“Do you?”

“No.”

Mitchell and I slide into a booth at The Cheesecake Factory, a ubiquitous presence in US malls that, despite its name, is neither a factory nor an especially convenient place to buy cheesecake. As Mitchell orders the chain’s signature Glamburger, I confront him with my million-dollar question. Sure, his creature can follow me to the ends of the Earth, but what if I board a plane?

“It would get to you,” he promises, betraying a certain pride in the tenacity of his creation. “If it could get onto the plane that you were on, it would.” Otherwise, he says, it would simply find another way to follow. He gives no specifics, instead allowing me to conjure my own image and lose myself in its horror. “The film is a nightmare,” says Mitchell. “If you find yourself in a nightmare, there’s no trying to explain the logic of it. You just try to survive.”

By creating a world outside of our own, Mitchell hands viewers a blank canvas on to which they can project anything: “You put something into the world and people are going to have all kinds of interpretations.” He’s open to almost all theories, although he admits some frustration at people who take the film’s premise at face value and accuse it of demonising sex. Even then, he notes: “It doesn’t really matter what I think.”

For what it’s worth, Mitchell offers a more upbeat take on the relationship between sex and death in It Follows. While he accepts that Jay “opens herself up to danger through sex”, he points out that “sex is the one way in which she can free herself from that danger”.

“We’re all here for a limited amount of time, and we can’t escape our mortality,” he says, “but love and sex are two ways in which we can – at least temporarily – push death away.”

The director eases back into the booth and takes another bite out of his Glamburger.